Dancing on Thin Ice by Arkady Polishchuk

Author:Arkady Polishchuk
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780998777047
Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
Published: 2018-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Citadel wall and old quarter of the city of Derbent, Republic of Dagestan. Circa 1880s/1890s. Dmitri Ivanovich Yermakov via Wikimedia Commons.

Yuri Yukhananov. 1975.

IN A WAY, I was prepared for the next trial, in 1975, of a young man named Yuri Yukhananov, several years before my ultimate rebellion. I had first known Yukhananov’s fellow tribesman Asaf Ilisarov. Asaf was an expert in Arabic dialects and befriended me when was translating some text for my magazine. Asaf claimed that he was a genuine Jew, not like me—an assimilated Muscovite who did not know a thing about being Jewish. There was nothing personal in this assessment. He looked down on all Jews who entered Russia after, according to his estimates, eighteen hundred years of wandering in the wilderness of European civilizations, systematically, step by step, losing their Jewish values and physical appearance. Such was this pundit’s view of history.

A Caucasian highlander with wild eyes and noble facial features, he laughed like a happy kid when I told him that if he grew a mustache, he would look like the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser. His clean-cut head, with its very short curly hair and slightly graying temples, was a little too big for his puny body.

The first time we met, I asked Asaf if he had been born in Azerbaijan. He looked at me like a shining mountain taking in a swampy lowland and said, “No, I’m a Tat from Derbent, the former Iranian gateway to the Caspian Sea.”

I thought that Tats were Muslims, worsening my moral and intellectual standing. Nonetheless, he continued, “Many Tats didn’t have anything to do with Jewishness, so it’s better to call us Mountain Jews. We lived in Northern Persia long before Jesus Christ was born, if he ever was born. Fire-worshipping Zoroastrians didn’t force us to abandon our religion. Only centuries later did Iranian shahs coerce us to convert to Islam. Those who didn’t were killed or had to run for their lives into uninhabited mountains. We didn’t interbreed for at least fifteen centuries. And this is why you don’t look like me.”

I heard something tender, like sympathy in his tenor and saw compassion in his dark eyes.

All I knew was that the Tats were a small tribe, perhaps a twenty-thousand-strong ethnic group living in the southern regions of the Soviet Union, in Azerbaijan and Dagestan. Asaf was accepted at a military academy in Moscow because nobody there knew that Dagestan Tats were actually Jews. “We were accomplished warriors and served in the Persian cavalry,” he said with such pride as if he had just dismounted at this door of his tiny Moscow apartment where we now stood.

Right away I asked, “Can you ride a horse?”

Asaf ignored my tactless question as we went inside, but to prove something, he opened a closet and pulled out a uniform with captain’s epaulets draped it on his narrow shoulders, and placed on his head an officer’s cap with a cockade blazing over the shiny visor.

Yuri Yukhananov definitely did not want to serve in the military.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.